The pressure of a workshop week

Its Wednesday morning and I’m in Reading. Yesterday we delivered the Watford workshop to a simply wonderful audience of dentists and team members – many old friends and some new faces. I am often asked how I manage to keep delivering the same workshops day after day. The answer is that each day produces a unique response from the clients – and that variety is my life-blood and oxygen. Yesterday’s group were smiling, happy, participative and had minds that were open enough to accommodate my knowledge and my humour! Today we are at The Reading Moat House, which brings back happy memories of the first ever Patient Journey workshops that I delivered to Boots Dentalcare back in 2001/2. Here we held our first pilot sessions with the Reading, Slough and Oxford branches of Boots. I wonder where all those people are now? I’m half way through week 3 of 3 and the exhaustion is beginning to kick in now. I’m falling behind in answering emails, the newsletter is late – all this is usual. Which is why I’ve planned a business development day at home on Friday – to catch up and clear the decks before I take a week’s vacation to rest and recuperate. Oil-rig shifts – that’s what I call these workshop tours – and like working on an oil rig, we have to take plenty of rest breaks off the rig. One of the mistakes that solopreneurs make is to believe that they can keep going like that for maybe 46-48 weeks a year – its just not possible. I take 12 weeks vacation every year, as well as plenty of short breaks. If I didn’t do that, I couldn’t do this.